Poem for a Tuesday — “Risk” by Lisa Colt

“My teacher says,

You’ve got to stink first.

I tell her, I don’t have time to stink–

at 64 years old

I go directly to perfection

or I go nowhere.

Perfection is nowhere,

she says, So stink.

Stink like a beginner,

stink like decaying flesh,

old blood,

cold sweat,

she says,

I know a woman who’s eighty-six,

last year she learned to dive.“

Published in Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, ed. Marilyn Sewell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

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